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John Eatwell

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WORK DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, Volume Two: The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 (Viking Penguin, 1994). I feel very possessive about John Maynard Keynes. He overshadowed the most formative years of my education. His General Theory shapes the way I think about economics. Though he died in 1946, Keynes still dominated economics at Cambridge in the mid-1960s. It wasn't just that all the leading figures among the faculty, Richard Kahn, Joan Robinson, Brian Reddaway, David Champernowne, Nicholas Kaldor, and James Meade, had been his pupils and/or collaborators. It was the tone of the place. The study of economics, theoretical or empirical, was driven by the desire to improve the conduct of economic policy. This did not mean that pure theory was neglected. Indeed, in those years Robinson was fighting a stirring battle in the realms of high theory with Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nor was Cambridge...

T he election of a Democratic president who has declared that his first priority is a set of active policies for economic recovery has produced a mix of reactions all too familiar to European social democrats. On the one hand, there is genuine relief, going far beyod enthusiasm for Clinton himself, that after years of drift and decline there is the prospect of something being done about slow growth, rising unemployment, and decaying social and economic infrastructure. And "something being done" in America will have reverberations around the world. On the other hand, there is that nagging fear that today accompanies every progressive politician into office-- the fear that once the new administration attempts to initiate significant economic change it will be overwhelmed by financial crises and will be forced by "the markets" to abandon even its more modest objectives. In the British Labour Party, the schadenfreude induced by the September 1992, humiliation of the Conservative...